WHY STAR TREK WORKS DESPITE ITSELF
By Devin Faraci Published Today The Devin's Advocate
This editorial contains spoilers.
I am proud to be a discerning movie viewer. I don't understand the desire to turn off your brain at the movies; I understand the desire to be completely transported from the theater into a new world, to have my everyday problems and issues drop away while I am amazed, delighted and moved by what I see on screen. I understand the desire to laugh and cry, to be thrilled and scared, to learn something about myself or to have the opportunity to see things in a new way. But I don't go to the movies for a hypnotizing light show. I don't go to the movies to stare slackjawed at images that have no relation to me or the world simply slide across a screen. I go to the movies not to be numbed but to be stimulated; a good movie is one that fills me with electricity and excitement, that makes me think or makes me feel, that sends me out of theater dizzy... not like I just got off Mister Toad's Wild Ride but dizzy with the sheer joy of filmmaking and communication, a movie that showed me something I had never before seen or introduced me to someone I would never otherwise know. That's why I go to the movies and why I spend my whole life seeing them, thinking about them and writing about them.
This means I'm unable to just sit in a movie and not think about it. And I definitely can't walk out of a movie without thinking about it. For many movies - especially summer movies - this is fatal. A single plot thread hangs, and tugging on it makes the whole thing come undone. Spectacle movies are constructed backwards; if they were the roller coasters to which they are so often compared by idiots, they would be built from the highest peak down, creating an engineering disaster. These movies can't support their own weight, and they're often not just dumb, they're downright anti-intellectual. They proudly spit tobacco through the gap in their front teeth, kick some ^^^^ with their boots and sneer at city boy ******* like me. 'Don't yew know how to have fun, son?'
So how is it possible that I have seen Star Trek twice now - the second viewing coming after spending lots of time dissecting the movie's gaping, moronic plot holes - and liked it both times? This is a movie that, on the surface, should be one that I find insufferable; I should be writing nothing but complaints about the shockingly bad script, the asinine plot contrivances and the nearly debilitating lack of internal logic. Yet I really liked Trek the second time through... perhaps even more than the first time. Have I become a complete hypocrite?
The answer, it seems, is magic. Or at least alchemy. The movies, at their base, are alchemical things, transmuting a myriad of elements into something else. Sometimes you can start with all the best elements and find that instead of transmuting into gold they become a heaping pile of ^^^^. And sometimes you can have a suspect series of elements that, through seeming sheer magic, become dazzling when transmuted through the camera.
This weekend I happened to watch a movie that, while it couldn't be more different from Star Trek, is a perfect example of an alchemical transmutation that simply didn't work. Popeye has, on its surface, all the elements that would be needed to make a damn entertaining movie. Director Robert Altman, while seemingly an odd choice for a musical comedy based on a cartoon, was coming off a bad streak and needed to prove that he could do something even half as good as Nashville again. And he had the best possible tools at his disposal: a script by cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who not only knew the world of Popeye but whose plays (and the screenplay for Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge) showed that he knew his way around a script. Altman had brilliant songwriter Harry Nilsson crafting classic tunes for the soundtrack. He had Robin Williams at the height of his comedic powers and Shelley Duvall, a woman seemingly born to play Olive Oyl. More than that he had boatloads of cash, enough money to create the entire fictional town of Sweethaven on location on the island of Malta. And behind the scenes he had the great Robert Evans, one of Hollywood's most powerful producers. Yet the movie that resulted is barely watchable; often more irritating than charming, Popeye is a noisy, busy, formless mess.
Then there's Star Trek. With a script by two of the least interesting writers in Hollywood, the go-to guys for true stupidity, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the movie seemed doomed from the start. And then there was the fact that director JJ Abrams had not yet shown himself capable of delivering a movie that felt like a movie, and that the cast was made up of either unknowns too pretty for their own good - Chris Pine - or actors who had proven they simply couldn't act - Zachary Quinto - or actors who felt wildly miscast - John Cho and Simon Pegg - and you have a lot of elements that seem to be stinking up the joint. Season that with a plot that attempts to reboot the franchise while also giving more than just lip service to the old canon and continuity and it seems obvious that you'll end up transmuting this into a solid log of dung.
But it didn't turn out that way. Watching Trek for the second time I was amazed at how the movie just kept working, even though the script was obviously shoddy and half-done*. And it's an example of that alchemy in action. Abrams, stepping up to the plate, realizes that when your overarching blueprint doesn't quite work you have to fill each scene with truth, excitement and humor. To that end Star Trek is less of a whole than a truly inspired series of parts; the movie is made up of great scenes that work on their own and that, when strung together in a row, make for something that tricks you into believing they're part of something bigger. It's the persistence of vision on a story level - just as film tricks you into believing that a series of still images projected at a high rate of speed are moving, Trek's series of great scenes tricks your brain into thinking you're watching a much better movie. It's alchemy. It's magic at work.
I have to wonder if maybe Abrams was aware that his script simply sucked (he's gone on the record as saying he was unhappy with it, but it'll be decades before someone comes out and admits that they went into production with half a script that they couldn't rewrite due to the strike) and as a result poured himself into making every individual scene work on its own. It's almost like the level of challenge forced Abrams to take things to the next level.
That level wouldn't have been possible without his cast. This is an important part of all movie alchemy; we're willing to forgive a lot if we like the actors who are transgressing against us. And Abrams' Star Trek crew charms completely; it's almost a pity that this movie, which feels sort of like a pilot for a TV series, isn't really one. These are actors who I would like to visit every week, and the nature of modern franchise economics tells me that we'll probably only get two more films with these people. But as individuals they work, and together as a group they mesh. You'll be watching a scene and wondering why the ^^^^ any of this is even happening, since none of it makes sense even by the terms of the movie itself, but then Chris Pine will say something or John Cho will arch an eyebrow and you'll be willing to let it slide.
The problem with most big dumb summer movies is that they don't even give half the effort this deeply flawed film does. They're happy to coast by on some improbable action, half-finished digital FX and seat-shaking soundtracks, hoping to beat you into submission with sound and fury. But Abrams comes from the opposite direction. Instead of overwhelming you with sight and sound he overwhelms you with charm; he's the host who is throwing a party so good you don't even mind that the last keg has been tapped. It's because of this that so many people are willing to overlook gaping plot holes with Star Trek while X-Men Origins: Wolverine's amnesia bullets have already become a geek joke. Gavin Hood just didn't throw a very good party.
A big element of what lets people go with Star Trek's intellectually stunted flow is the optimism Abrams brings to the film. While he didn't invent that - it's a part of the Trek franchise from the very start - he does understand what 'The human adventure' means, and in this era of The Dark Knight, where grim and gritty and dark is the order of the blockbuster day, that positivity is refreshing. Abrams realizes that you don't have to lose the stakes or the repercussions - he kills 6 billion people in his movie, for ^^^^'s sake. Try and beat that, Joker - in order to make your film pleasant and upbeat. The characters may often be facing tough situations, but it's obvious that they can always surmount them - without losing themselves while doing it. Later in life Gene Roddenberry decided that the Trek universe should be free of almost all conflict, but in his earliest days on the show his philosophy was one where flawed humans were able to step up and get the job done with intelligence and courage. That element, more than any other, is what Abrams captures from the original show, and just like with the original show it's an element that makes an audience willing to look the other way when the Enterprise flies through a plot hole or two dozen.
In the end Star Trek makes a lie of one of Hollywood's cozy little homilies, that your movie is only as good as your script. That's a homily nobody has ever actually believed anyway (if they did, they'd write better scripts and wouldn't start filming until they had a script finished), but it's one that's often proven true. Summer after summer we are assaulted with movies so dumb that they boggle the mind, and while those films make plenty of money they're essentially discarded once the weather gets cold again. Star Trek, while riddled with problems, feels different. I don't know that this film will end up being something people embrace in a few years, but unlike other recent blockbuster franchise starters, it feels more like something people will really want to revisit in a sequel as opposed to being browbeaten into revisiting through oppressive marketing. And with Abrams' surprising ability to make gold with the elements he was given, the idea of him coming back with better building blocks is exciting.
If they don't make the next movie so ^^^^ing stupid, that is.
* a second viewing makes me believe that the script was caught directly in the middle of a rewrite when the strike hit. It almost feels like the latest draft ended at page 65 and then the old draft, with some minor spackling, was added. Many of the huge plot holes and problems come in the second half of the movie, and many of the scenes in the second half feel like they're paying off a completely different film. Why, on Delta Vega, does Kirk tell Spock Prime that coming back in time to change history and save everyone was cheating when Spock came back in time completely by accident? These characters are obviously having a conversation that grew out of a discarded draft of the script.
